Aaaaaand Bug has now completely freaked herself out over the harder work, which she hasn't even gotten yet. She drew a picture and gave it to me today. It has Spongebob on it with a speech bubble that says "I'm NOT ready for the harder work". Hubs told her he wanted to talk to her and she said she didn't want to talk. He said she didn't even know what he wanted to talk to her about...she said yes she did, he wanted to talk about the harder work. So he tried to trick her into talking about it by way of talking about food...that you try new things and sometimes you like them and sometimes you don't, that no one gets mad if you don't like something, etc. She says "I know what you want to say." So he ended up dropping it, but it looks like I'll be talking to her teacher Monday morning before school.

Lynne, yep, my kids both have what you call a Booster seat. We still call them car seats.
I never thought about the fact that there would be publishers with bad reputations for quality, but I suppose that's true. Which is kind of sad, really...it just makes people wary of the GOOD publishers as well.
It's nice that Rochelle wants to publish more for you! That's great! Good luck with that! I'm excited but sad for the end of The Verindon Trilogy.

it's a busy but nice Saturday today. I'm going to coffee with an old school friend this morning and Hubby's going to take Little Man to swimming instead. Then Little Man has a birthday party to go to this afternoon. It's at one of those play places, so I'll stay around chatting to the other parents. The little boy whose have the birthday is a nice kid and I get along well with his mother, so it should be a good time with lots of socialising for me today!

Susan - Sounds like Bug is one of those people for whom the anticipation is worse than the actual event! I'm a lot like that, and it's hard to get out of the mindset. I think you're doing the right things in trying to help her, though. Yes, some publishers have poor quality control. One of my author friends had her debut novel published by a small American publisher. Her book is littered with spelling and grammatical errors that their poor editor did not pick up. Everyone who's read it has found them instantly. However, when she mentioned getting rid of them in subsequent edition to her publisher, they said, "No, we think it will demonstrate your writing journey if we leave them there. It will show how much you improve." Which really means they don't care enough to waste time fixing up what their people should have corrected prior to publication! When I told Rochelle she was horrified. We recently had a book that was accidentally typeset with an earlier version of the manuscript that still had a lot of errors, and even though we haven't sold all the earlier edition, we have published a second edition with a new cover and everything! Rochelle doesn't compromise when it comes to improving her company's image.

I've seen Sarah and Marielle around on Facebook. I guess they're too busy to come here at the moment.

Had a pretty good night last night, even though my main meal--a pizza--didn't turn out quite the way I hoped.

I do have F1 qualifying to check out later tonight and a few things to do here, and I'll try and take a nap tomorrow morning before Sebring starts.

Oh, and I've been promising to share something with you guys, or at least I mentioned something about it earlier this week. It's related to my fan fic, and one of my favorite characters from it. She's not an OC, but a character from the manga Guyver that has influenced this story along with the Twilight Saga.

Shizu may be a very nice, compassionate, kind and gentle young woman (and aligned with the Cullen family), but as can be told from looking at her battle form, she's not something that one would want to mess with. In my story, she also becomes a vampire hybrid, which makes her essentially immortal and increases her powers and abilities--in human form and battle form--immensely. IMO, that's one of the things that makes fan fic fun.

Hey, hey, hey...I wrote here on what, Monday, Tuesday?! Now where's my post? <grumble> I tend to lurk most days and have been trying to post more. I thought I posted here earlier this week but maybe something happened to it? Bummer!

Anyway..it's Friday here and Jason's out...originally I had planned on doing a bunch of cleaning but I ended up taking a nap and I'm working my way through the Christy Miller series since I've never gone back and read the entire series. I got them for a great deal off of eBay. This week flew by, I've been busy with work and my cold is finally almost gone! I haven't gotten sick like this in years. I just have the residual cough left.

We don't have any plans for this weekend, beyond me going in to the office tomorrow. I'm planning on using all the money I'm earning there for the trip, which is coming up in just 39 days! I need to get back on Weight Watchers, it's really hard to do it when I have a cold because all I've wanted is carbs!

Song-aww poor Bug! She sounds so smart and capable, it's tricky to get them to believe it, isn't it? Poor kiddo. I'm glad your kids are doing well, I love hearing the stories! My Mom often compares to me to Spongebob, particularly when he freaks out over something minor

Lynne-I'm so glad the edit is going well and you got offered some more work. You'll have to tell me more about self publishing, though all of my writing has stalled at the moment beyond the blog I write occasionally to keep my skills sharpened.

Kids parties are the best when you like the parents and can use the time to socialize

Yesterday was a good day. I enjoyed my coffee with my friend and Little Man had a great time at the party. Hubby says Little Man did really well at swimming, too.

The only downer was that I looked at Goodreads and The Heir's average rating is now 3.98. While it was inevitable that it would fall below 4.00 at some point, and most books I like do have an average rating below 4.00 on Goodreads, it's still difficult to see. It is a good thing too, in a way, as it means I have a lot of ratings. 52 now, just for The Heir. I am trying to look at the positives.

Sarah - I would never recommend self publishing, actually. There are too many traps involved. I understand that some people do find it necessary though, as publishers do have to stop somewhere. I certainly would never advise it unless you've had at least one professional edit on your work. Many people don't think that a professional edit will make any difference. They've edited their books and had their friends edit their books and that should be enough, shouldn't it? Nope, unless those friends are already in the industry and understand it and how books work. Even then, getting the perspective from someone who isn't a friend is a good idea too.

Nothing really new here...just trying to gear up for this next week. I have to bake Monday, then take MM to physical therapy, then on Tuesday I have to get my cavities filled and then I have a meeting with the parents board and then choir in the evening. I'm on the Easter committee for the school and in the past, we've always sponsored a brunch, in which we buy all the bread, meat, spreads, fruit, drinks, etc and put a brunch together for each classroom. We (the parents board) pay for it and we do the shopping and divide everything up, serve it, etc...and apparently a couple of the teachers have decided they want to do it differently this year. They want us to just provide drinks and maybe a stipend for low income families, and every child makes a list of what they want for brunch and another kid makes breakfast for them. I see disaster. This neighborhood is almost all low income families. If we have to give a stipend to every low income family to buy the stuff for breakfast, it's going to cost SOOOO much more than just buying the stuff ourselves. Not to mention issues of kids being sick and not coming to school that day so the kid for whom they were to provide breakfast has nothing. Or kids forgetting to bring the note home, or forgetting they were supposed to bring breakfast that day...or kids from large families who have 4 breakfast wish lists to buy for, or food allergies... ugh...REALLY bad idea. Nice in concept, but I don't see it working well. I don't even understand why the teachers want to change it...they aren't the ones who do the work or pay for it. It makes no sense to me.

Lynne, I saw you post about the rating on FB. I'm sorry...that must be hard to see, even knowing it would probably happen. No one likes rejections.
Yes, Bug is definitely one of those people. She gets it from me. I cried in elementary school when I got a new teacher because I didn't know what to expect. My mother always told me to give it a chance, and in most cases, the ones I was most worried about turned out to be my favorite teachers. But I've always been apprehensive of new challenges, breaking down when I was worried I would fail at something. (Dutch Language school...I had several breakdowns as I moved up in difficulty, convinced that they had me mixed up with someone else who actually knew what they were doing) So she comes by it honestly, but I don't know how to help her, as I still suffer from it myself.
Ugh...that doesn't speak very well for that American Publisher!! I think it more closely demonstrates their own poor quality and laziness rather than the writer's journey and improvement. And I've heard horror stories about self-publishing. I'm not a writer myself...that is, I'm not an aspiring author. I love to read, and I think I missed my calling...I should have done something with English in college. I want to be a reader, but I know I'm not qualified to edit...I couldn't tell someone what to cut and where to move this and bla bla. I can find typos and I can tell a person "This character isn't likeable" or "That doesn't make sense in this part" or "That contradicts something here" but as far as editing editing, I can't do that. As much as I LOVE kind of beta reading for people, I don't feel yet like I could charge money to do it because I lack any solid credentials. All I have is my own personal taste. I did apply for a reader job and the woman asked me what genres I was interested in and I sent her a list of my favorite books and I never heard back from her, so apparently our tastes did not match up. But I don't understand how people can trust themselves to be objective in the editing process of their own material and publish it themselves without having unbiased, trained individuals look at it and give advice. That just seems to me to be shooting themselves in the foot. At least I know my own limits!

Sarah, did you maybe post at the same time as someone else and instead of submitting, it says something like "There has been at least one new post. Would you like to edit your reply before submitting?" instead of "Post successfully submitted"? I've done that before, not noticing it was a different message and if you leave the page, your post is lost.
I actually haven't really watched Spongebob. I've seen bits and pieces, but never a whole episode. But yes, Bug freaks out, usually when there's a challenge. She's perfectly capable of doing it, she just isn't confident. I saw an article about that not too long ago, and I've been trying to be better about the language I use with her, but it's habit to just say "Wow, you are so smart!" when she gets a stellar report card..you want to praise her, but forget that that sends the message that if she DOESN'T get a stellar report card, it means she's NOT smart. I need to really work on saying "You must have really worked hard" or "Wow, you must have been really paying attention!" so it's something she's got control over, rather than something that's intrinsic. And I feel SO guilty that I have passed on all my insecurities to her.
How are you doing with the weight loss? Carbs are a huge weakness for me, too!

I'm waiting to hear if Grandma will be released from the hospital today. So far, I've felt kinda like crap because of the weather and not getting much sleep. The latter point is kinda my fault because of wanting to watch something this morning while trying to have my brothers get some sleep, and I still feel sick from that cold that I had last week.

I don't have too much planned for today. I'm probably going to try and get some rest once I know that someone will be up to watch our wood stove and get some stuff worked on. I was hoping to maybe work on some fan fic tonight, but that'll depend on how I feel later.

Had a really nice day today. In the Netherlands, for some odd reason, people celebrate 12.5 years of marriage like we celebrate 10 years, and hubs and I will be married for 12.5 years on Saturday, but his mom's 65th birthday bash is Sunday, so we decided to do something fun today instead. We're not party people, so rather than having the big party, we decided to do a weekend in April in combination with Hub's 40th birthday, and today we took the kids to a park in Arnhem. They got to feed ducks, play soccer, play above a waterfall, sending leaves racing over the edge, build a hut in the woods, etc...tons of stuff. Then we went out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants.
I guess a guy I went to high school with died on Friday. He was working in his workshop and they think a propane tank leaked or something and it caught fire and he was killed. So sad. I didn't really know him...he was a few years younger. But his sister was only a year behind me in school and she was a sweetheart and one of my friends. I feel so bad for her family!!

Sean, I must have missed that your grandma was in the hospital. What happened? Is she ok?

I'm working for our business today. I think I will also finish the final edit on The Reign today, which is really exciting!

Susan - Celebrating 12.5 years does sound a little strange, but I'm glad you had fun. You know, from what you described you sound like you could be an editor. I don't really have a piece of paper saying I can do it either. It's something you learn from experience.

This weekend has been busy! I think it'll remain so until the end of tax season. I volunteered to work for Saturdays for my FIL in his accounting office. It's a tricky situation since Jason's lazy bro (the one who is 'special') has always worked there but his work has gotten increasingly sloppy this year I feel like because he resents having to come in...it's hard because for the past two years I haven't been working full time elsewhere so I could put in a lot more time, but this year I just don't have as much time to give since the cleaning schedule is so full. They're behind and the deadline is in a month, so I'm trying to find more afternoons to go in. At least I can use the money I'm earning towards our vacation!

Thankfully I'm not working full days, just half days, so I was able to come home and take a long nap Jason and I watched movies last night and spent today running errands and doing some cleaning.

Song-Ah, maybe that was it. I wasn't paying attention when I posted..but I have been here!

I think you're doing a great job, just doing what you're doing with her. Keep encouraging her to do her best and that she doesn't have to be perfect. Ask what's the worst thing that'll happen if she doesn't accomplish x,y,z...I try to keep that in my mind! Don't feel so bad-my Mom did the same thing and she still apologizes...but I think it's made me a stronger person. I've learned a lot about myself as I figured out how navigate the adult world with anxiety issues. It's just apart of life!

My weight loss has stalled with my cold, but I'm feeling back to normal again so I'm definitely trying to get back on track. Our vacation is in just over a month! I need to get in better shape anyway. Congrats on the anniversary, sounds like you had fun!

Lynne-I can see why self publishing isn't a good idea. If I ever got to that point, I'd definitely want people to look at it over and over to make sure it's good! Sounds like you had a good weekend. Sorry about The Heir, that must be frustrating!